Chapter 8
EIGHT
We moved up the front walk together to where Monique awaited us on the porch.
“Thank you for coming.” Her words seemed welcoming, but her stance appeared tense and impatient. “Where do you want to start?”
I turned to Kira. “Your nose would be better than mine. How do you feel about shifting here?”
“Should be fine,” she confirmed. “I’m small enough for most indoor spaces, as long as it’s okay with Monique.”
“I don’t care what you have to do,” Monique said firmly. “Just bring my son home.”
“May we step inside?” Kira requested. “I just need a moment of privacy for my shift.”
Monique led the way into her beautifully restored home and pointed Kira to a side room. My friend vanished for a moment, I heard the rustling of clothing, and then she bounded out again, this time in her dragon form.
My mouth dropped open, and Monique let out a quiet, shocked curse.
I knew Kira was a dragon, of course. I even knew her shifted form was far smaller than normal, due to the magic-suppressing bracelet she’d worn for most of her life. But actually seeing her…
She was only about ten feet long from nose to tail and covered in shimmering coppery scales. Her form was sleek and balanced—built for speed and agility rather than battle—and her wings were tucked neatly against her body.
“Okay,” she said cheerfully. “Let’s start smelling.”
And that was the other weird thing about Kira—her dragon could speak, and not just telepathically.
“Upstairs,” Monique breathed, her voice emerging with a bit of a squeak as she stared at Kira. “First door on your right.”
“On it.”
The dragon bounded away, and small as she was, the stairs creaked beneath her weight.
“Can she…” Monique seemed to stop herself.
“It’s okay to ask,” I told her. “There’s nothing wrong with being curious, and I’ll tell you if it’s something she wouldn’t want me to share.”
“Can she breathe fire? Could she accidentally…”
“No, definitely not,” I said hastily. “She can breathe fire, yes, but she’s fully in control of it. She won’t burn your house down. And she doesn’t get any bigger.”
The other woman let out a deep deliberate sigh and closed her eyes. “Okay. Sorry. It’s just… a lot.”
“No worries at all. We should probably follow her though, in case she has questions.”
We took the stairs two at a time and found Kira in a small bedroom that clearly belonged to a teenage boy.
It was painted dark blue, with white baseboards and trim and a restored hardwood floor.
The bed was covered in a plain blue comforter, and the bedding was rumpled, as if someone had just gotten up.
There were three or four pairs of athletic shoes on the floor, a pile of clothes thrown over the back of a chair, and a half dozen dirty plates stacked on the desk beside a computer.
Empty soda cans rolled on the floor beneath the desk, beside an overflowing trashcan with a pizza box stacked precariously on top .
“I’m so sorry.” Monique sounded deeply embarrassed as she headed straight for the desk and grabbed the dirty dishes.
“I swear, if I tell him once, I tell him five times a day to bring his dishes down, but it’s like talking to a wall.
He spends all his time online chatting with his friends or playing games. ”
“No, wait!” Kira bounded over the bed and stopped her with one clawed forefoot. “Leave it. I need to see everything.”
She sniffed around the desk towards the closet and pulled open the door, only to be hit on the head with falling shoeboxes and nearly buried in an avalanche of clothing that smelled very strongly of teenage boy.
“Well, I don’t think anyone ambushed him from inside the closet,” she muttered as she shook her head to dislodge a hoodie that had gotten hung up on her ear.
“Do you smell anything you recognize?”
Her head tilted. “I do, but I’m not sure what to make of it. Monique, has the window been locked the whole time?”
“Yes,” Monique assured her. “It’s not alarmed, but we keep them closed and locked during the winter. And no one has changed anything since yesterday morning, when I found out he was missing.”
“Did you ask the human police to take fingerprints?”
“They said there was no reason to do that yet,” she said helplessly. “They just asked a lot of questions about our relationship and his friends and how he’s doing at school. And when I explained that everything was locked and nothing was disturbed, they just said he must have left on his own.”
“Hmmm…” Kira eyed the window. “I need to look around outside.”
Without waiting for us, she bounded away, down the stairs and out the front door.
A few seconds later, her face appeared in the window as she hovered in midair, flapping her wings gently. After a moment, she shot up, and we heard the thud of her landing on the roof.
Monique’s expression turned worried. Probably wondering if the dragon was about to crash right through her ceiling.
“Just pretend it’s a really big squirrel,” I murmured. “I promise she’ll be careful.”
We made our way downstairs a little more slowly, then out the back door, to find Kira nosing around the yard like a very large, winged dog. When she finished, she walked over to us, shook out her wings, and huffed in frustration.
“Okay,” she said, “I have news, but I don’t know what it means.”
“I’ll take anything,” Monique said grimly. “Just tell me so I have some idea where to look next.”
“There are hints of magic,” Kira announced. “So unless your son has Idrian friends who’ve been over recently, I think we can conclude that you’re correct about his kidnapping.”
Monique’s head fell back, her eyes closed, and her whole body seemed to sag. “I knew it,” she whispered. “I don’t think I wanted to be right, but I just knew…”
“And in light of that,” Kira continued gently, “if you would like us to discontinue this investigation, I understand.”
The older woman’s eyes flew open. “Why? Because you’re Idrian?”
Kira nodded carefully.
But Monique only glared at her. “Do you blame all humans for the crappy things one or two of them do?” Her tone was tart with annoyance.
“Nooo.” Kira’s ears flattened cautiously. “I just wanted you to have the option. You don’t know us, and you really have no reason to trust us other than Shane’s word. So I wanted to offer in case you needed to take time to think about it and decide for yourself.”
“I trust you,” Monique said. Her jaw was clenched, and her eyes sparked with anger as she rested her hands on her hips. “Now what else do you know?”
“This is where it gets tricky,” Kira admitted.
“Shapeshifters can smell magic, and in our shifted forms, we can tell the difference between individuals. I can tell you all the scents I detected are new to me, but there are traces of gryphon, air elemental, and fae, along with a tiny whiff of… sprite. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s sprite. Ari is the only one I’ve ever met.”
Well, that would explain a lot. But the weirdest thing wasn’t the variety of scents.
“Just traces?”
The dragon nodded. “And those traces only linger in specific spots. There’s no scent trail through the yard or on the roof. The only noticeable trail in the house is fae, but it’s faint.”
So we had a conspiracy of different races to steal a random boy.
The sprite could teleport inside, unlock the window, and let the others in.
The air elemental could have lowered the boy out the window, where the gryphon could carry him away, and the fae could have provided silence for the whole operation.
Then the sprite relocked the window, teleported out, and left no traces.
But for what? Why go to so much trouble? Unless…
No scent trail through the yard or on the roof.
A gryphon shifter would leave a very clear scent trail behind. Same with a fae, or an air elemental, and only the gryphon could fly. So how did they get in and out of the house without leaving any traces?
Unless they weren’t Idrian at all.
Dread curled itself around my heart once more, this time with an undercurrent of rage. If I was right…
But I didn’t want to have this conversation in front of Monique. I needed to talk to Kira first. Talk to Faris. Decide the best way to chase this down without alerting the humans.
“I need to call Callum,” I said aloud. “I think the next step is to look for fingerprints, just in case we can find anyone who’s already in the system.”
“Do Idrians use fingerprints?” Monique asked skeptically.
How to explain without her getting suspicious?
“Not usually,” I hedged, “but I have a friend who ran a check for prints recently, so someone out there must be able to do it.”
That search hadn’t found anything, because every one of the kidnappers had been Idrian. But if my hunch was correct, maybe we would get lucky and the human police would have a record. I just needed to know who Callum had contacted last time. Which meant I needed Callum to answer his phone…
I turned to Monique. “We need to chase down a few potential options, so let’s share phone numbers. I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything concrete, and we can decide on next steps. But I promise we won’t do anything potentially dangerous without letting you know.”
I could tell she was reluctant to agree.
Reluctant for us to leave. Right now, it must feel like the search was finally moving forward.
Every new clue brought her closer to finding her son.
But the moment we left, she was back to helpless waiting, and that was the worst feeling when someone you loved was in pain.
“And please call me if you hear anything, or even just remember any new details,” I added. “Any messages from the kidnappers, any new info from the police, any clues from Jeremiah’s friends… Anything at all could help.”
Monique agreed and led us back inside so Kira could shift. And as we drove away, she lingered on the porch, watching us with her arms tightly folded, as if holding herself together by sheer force of will.